A Broken Heart Is Blind

Summary:

College AU - When Lydia dumps Stiles to get back with Jackson, Stiles rebounds with Derek, his former TA. It was just supposed to be a one night stand, but they're both a little confused about what the rules for those are.

Work Text:

This is the worst party in the history of ever. Why, why, why, did he let Scott talk him into coming to this horrible place? No man should ever have to watch his ex-girlfriend make out with a douche who uses too much hair product and seems to be allergic to shirts and yet that’s exactly what he’s doing. The only saving grace to this shit storm is the vast amount of alcohol present. It’s like these guys have never even heard of BYOB. Stiles even has his very own bottle of Jack cradled to his chest.

“She was my everything and all I wanted was to be her everything and now she’s over there letting Jackson fucking Whittemore touch her and kiss her and—“ Stiles breaks off into pained moan when Lydia very obviously palms Jackson through his jeans. “How is this my life? What did I do to deserve getting my heart stomped on and then having to watch the girl of my dreams participate in what is basically soft core porn less than a week later?”

Stiles raises the bottle to his lips; it’s the only thing that loves him back anymore. Instead of the whiskey burning its way down his throat, though, the liquid splashes against his lips and dribbles down his chin when Scott pulls the bottle out of his hands.

“Scott, when your best friend gets dumped, you get your best friend drunk. You’re not doing your job.” Stiles makes grabby hands for the bottle and Scott frowns and holds it further away.

“You’ve already had a lot. You should probably take it easy.”

“Nope, I can still feel feelings. What’s the point of post-breakup drinking binges if they don’t make it go away?”

“Make what go away?” It’s possible that Scott is drunk, too, because Stiles was being perfectly clear.

“Everything, man. Just… everything.”

Allison pops out of subspace or something because suddenly she’s just there, perched on the arm of Scott’s chair. It’s possible she was there all along and Stiles was too fixated on the way Lydia arched her neck while Jackson marked his territory with bites and kisses and what looked like way too much spit.

“Drinking isn’t going to help get Lydia out of your head, Stiles. I think you may need to consider rebound sex to help get you through this. You’re bi, right?” She asks.

“Yeah. What does that have to do with anything? Did Lydia suddenly turn into a guy?”

“No, Stiles, we’re talking about potential rebound hook-ups. Focus. I asked because that guy keeps staring over here at you. What do you think?”

Stiles follows Allison’s gaze and quickly turns back to face her once he sees who she’s talking about. “Nope, not an option. That’s Derek Hale.” Of course she had to pick out the only person other than Lydia Martin who has made Stiles pop a boner out of fear. He’d been the TA for Stiles’ History class last year and Stiles had barely passed the course. It was kind of hard to concentrate on lectures when he spent the entire semester either terrified, aroused, or terrifyingly aroused.

“Are you sure? He seems pretty interested.” She tilts her head consideringly. “He looks pretty built, too. I bet he’s great in bed. Lots of stamina.” Scott makes a wounded noise next to her and her dreamy smile slides into an indulgent one. “Not better than you, though, babe.”

Stiles risks another glance and sure enough, Derek is still staring at him. Glaring is more like it. Stiles doesn’t think he’s ever seen an expression so neutral as staring on Derek’s face. “He’s probably just pissed that one of his former students is at the same party as him and is trying to kill me with his brain.”

“It’s just rebound sex, Stiles. It doesn’t really matter who you pick, you just need to get Lydia out of your head,” she tells him before she disappears back into subspace. She takes Scott with her, but they leave the bottle of whiskey and that’s the only friend he needs right now.

Maybe five minutes pass before the couch cushion next to him dips and someone plucks the bottle of whiskey out of his hands once again. He’s about to whine at Scott to just leave him alone to his self-destruction, but when he turns it’s not Scott sitting next to him, but Derek.

“And the hits just keep on comin’” Stiles mutters.

“You look miserable. You want to get out of here?” Derek asks. It’s probably the most straight forward come on Stiles has ever heard, but he can’t imagine Derek bothering with flattery or persuasion.

“You hate me.” There’s no way Allison was right about Derek being interested.

Derek raises a hand to Stiles’ neck and strokes a thumb over the soft bristles of hair at his nape. “No. I don’t.” He gives Stiles a slow once over with his eyes and when he finally makes eye contact again his pupils are blown and Stiles swallows hard at the attention. It’s possible that Allison was right.

“Okay, let’s go.” Rebound sex. He can do this.

Derek lives next door in a tiny two bedroom bungalow, which is convenient because Derek turns out to be very handsy and they barely make it to Derek’s bedroom without tearing each other’s clothes off. If they’d had to bother with a cab ride or a long walk across campus, they’d probably have been arrested for public nudity.

“Oh God, that is so unfair,” Stiles moans when he finally gets Derek’s shirt off.

“Do you want me to put it back on?”

“No! I definitely don’t want that.” He reaches out and skims a hand over Derek’s unreal abs just in case he hides them away again anyway. “No, I just don’t get why you’re doing this.”

Derek crowds in close, his hands braced against the door on either side of Stiles’ head. “Do you have any idea what you look like when you chew on a pen? Do you have any idea how badly I wanted to jump over those rows of desks and make you show me what that mouth could really do?” He dips in and bites down on Stiles’ bottom lip. “I have never been so glad for a semester to be over before in my life.”

Stiles’ own shirt disappears, too, and then his pants get pushed down around his ankles, and Stiles lets his head thunk back against the door while Derek bites and sucks kisses into his skin, taking a meandering path down his torso until Derek is kneeling before him, mouthing his cock through his underwear.

“This is such a bad idea.” Stiles says it to himself, but Derek hears of course because he’s right there, and immediately stops what he’s doing and sits back on his heels.

“Do you want to stop?” Derek asks. It’s dark because neither of them could be bothered to turn on the light when they came in, but there’s a sliver of light breaking through the thick curtains on the window and it’s enough to see that Derek’s lips are wet and parted temptingly. He’s gripping his thighs tightly as though it’s the only thing keeping him from ravishing Stiles where he stands and there’s a very large and obvious bulge tenting Derek’s pants.

“Why the hell would I want to stop?” Stile whines. He reaches for Derek’s shoulder to pull him back but he deflects it easily.

“You just said –“

“And I’ve been told I talk too much. I’ve been told that by you, even.” He was especially told that by Lydia.

Stiles spares a thought for Lydia since she’s the reason he’s here, half-naked and about to have sex with the hottest guy on campus, but all that’s coming to mind is the look on her face when Jackson slipped his hand under her shirt. She dumped him, he reminds himself, and there’s nothing wrong with a little casual, string-free sex to help him forget about the soul crushing agony of rejection.

He pushes his underwear down to join his pants and then awkwardly steps out of the tangle of fabric and shoes, somehow managing not to faceplant in the process. “I’m going to go utilize that giant comfy bed you’ve got over there. You can join me, or—Oof!”

His taunt is cut off by Derek tackling him onto said giant comfy bed. He’s not even on the bed all the way. Somehow both his head and a leg are dangling over the edge, but it doesn’t matter because Derek finally takes him into his mouth and sucks lightly on the head of his cock. The location of any of his other body parts is suddenly irrelevant.

Derek is positioned so that Stiles can just reach his leg if he stretches. He scoots a little until he can wrap his hand around the back of Derek’s knee and it anchors him to have something to hold onto while Derek sucks and licks and does things with his tongue that make him forget that he’s just been dumped and where he lives and what his name is.

He can still hear the party raging next door, drunk people shouting on the lawn and music blasting, but it’s muffled by the rush of blood in his ears and his own moans that he couldn’t hold back even if he wanted to. Each one is torn from him with the tightening of Derek’s lips and with the twist of his hand and then soothed away with a delicate lick.

It ends too quickly, but then a year of Derek sucking him off would still end too quickly. He comes forcefully, his back arching off the bed and his fingers twisting in the fabric of Derek’s jeans. He blinks and tries to clear the sudden spots in his vision while Derek nuzzles his side and bites gently at his hipbone until he can breathe again.

The bulge in Derek’s jeans is even larger now if that’s even possible and when he ghosts his knuckles over it, Derek breathes in sharply and pulls Stiles to him so he’s no longer hanging off the bed. It takes them a minute to get arranged but they finally position themselves the right way on the bed, kick the comforter down to their feet, and Derek at last takes off his damn jeans.

This is the first time Stiles has been completely naked with another man. He traded handjobs with Danny a few times back in Freshman year and that had been nice and all, but it wasn’t quite the same as this. Sneaking your hand into your friend’s pants under the covers while his dormmate worked on a paper across the room was miles away from getting to touch and see every inch of flesh. The way Danny had kissed him with too much tongue and too little body contact was nothing like the way Derek wraps himself around Stiles and runs his hands possessively over his ass.

He’d had sex with Lydia, of course, but she had been all soft curves and smooth skin and breathy moans. Derek rolls Stiles onto his back and the body above him is solid and muscular and the cock thrusting against his hip is anything but soft. His jaw is covered in sharp stubble and it rasps along Stiles’ throat and scrapes across his shoulder when Derek bites a trail of bruises into his skin from jaw to collarbone. They move together and the noises Derek makes are deep and more like grunts than the perfectly rehearsed moans Stiles is used to.

He lets Derek press him into the mattress and rock against him with only sweat and precum and the remnants of Derek’s saliva to ease the friction and he does his best to match his movements and to make this even a fraction of how good his own orgasm was. There’s not a lot he can do with Derek holding him down the way he is, but he tilts his head until he can catch Derek’s mouth and slide their lips together, open and wet. Derek’s hips press down hard for a moment before he starts up a rhythm again, faster and sloppier than before. The kiss is little more than their lips brushing against each other, Derek too far gone to do more than pant into his mouth. Stiles bites down hard on his bottom lip and traces it with his tongue and Derek shudders, thrusts twice more against his hip and comes messily between them.

Stiles expects Derek to either collapse on top of him or move away, but instead he simply shifts his weight to the side, presses soft kisses to Stiles’ lips, and soothes the angry bite marks on his neck with gentle caresses. He’s about to say something, anything to break this weirdly intimate mood, when Derek finally stops petting him and gets up. He lays there staring at the ceiling while Derek retrieves a washcloth from somewhere to clean them both up. They wipe the splatters of cum off themselves and toss the cloth into a corner and Derek flops back onto the bed next to him. He should go. He should get up and put his clothes on and thank Derek for the orgasm and be on his way. That’s what people did when they had casual sex, right? Didn’t it like, mean something if you stayed the night?

“Wow. So, I should probably go. I’m like, really tired all of a sudden.” Stiles stretches and fakes a yawn that turns into a real one.

Derek throws an arm around his waist and curls their bodies together until Stiles can feel warm breath on the back of his neck. “Your dorm is really far away.”

“It is,” Stiles agrees. It’s all the way on the other side of campus and Derek’s bed is right here.

“Go to sleep, Stiles.”

Stiles is pretty sure that’s a bad idea, too, but he does it anyway.

---

When Stiles wakes the next day, it’s with a thankfully minimal hangover and his absurdly hot former TA sleeping next to him with a soft, content look on his face. He actually slept with, nay, spent the night with, the guy who once covered all ten pages of his term paper in fat red x’s just because Stiles got a little off topic. He’d had to rewrite it three times before Derek finally agreed to grade it.

“Wow. Worst choice for a rebound fuck ever.” Stiles says aloud and Derek stirs in his sleep, the sheet slipping down to reveal sharp hipbones and the dark trail of hair leading down to a rather impressive case of morning wood. “Or maybe the best; I can’t decide.”

Derek blinks his eyes open and the easy, contented look fades into the old familiar scowl. “Is that what this was?”

“Yes?” Stiles is pretty sure that’s the correct answer. The stare Derek is giving him is remarkably like the one he gives while he proctors exams. The one that made Stiles want to erase all of his answers and start over every five minutes.

Derek’s scowl stays put and Stiles is sure he’s answered incorrectly and failed whatever test Derek is putting him through in his head. Slowly, the scowl turns into a smirk and Derek strokes a hand deliberately up Stiles’ inner thigh. “Well, everyone knows that the best rebound fucks are one night stands. We should make the most of this one while you’re still here.”

Stiles turns his head and looks pointedly at the sliver of light shining on the carpet. “Derek, it’s already morning. I’m pretty sure this no longer fits the definition of a one night stand.”

“Everyone also knows that one night stands last as long as you don’t leave the bedroom.” He mouths at one of the bites on Stiles’ neck and it hurts but it also makes his hips lurch up into Derek’s waiting hand.

“Well, most people are idiots.” Derek dips his head to circle a nipple with his tongue and Stiles reaches out blindly until he gets Derek’s cock in his hand, needing to share how good he feels and needing something solid to hold onto.

“What if one of us has to go to the bathroom?” Stiles asks, mostly because he still thinks Derek’s rules are bullshit, but maybe because he also wants to know what kind of time limit he has here.

“The rule is that if the bathroom is adjoined to the bedroom, then bathroom breaks are allowed.” Derek’s voice is muffled, his lips never fully leaving Stiles’ skin.

“And just out of curiosity, where is your bathroom?” Derek’s cock slips from his grasp and Stiles brain slowly catches on to the fact that he is about to get blown for the second time in less than ten hours.

Derek lifts his head briefly enough to flick his eyes to Stiles’ left before he continues his downward path. Stiles lets his head roll to the side and sees what is, presumably, the bathroom through a slightly ajar door. He doesn’t want to examine how relieved he feels that this doesn’t have to end yet. It’s just the head-spinningly good blow jobs and the killer orgasms. Anyone would be relieved to prolong an experience like this. It didn’t mean it meant anything.

A horrible, horrible thought suddenly occurs to him just as Derek is about to close his lips around the head of his cock. His hands fist in Derek’s hair and he yanks his head back until Derek is staring up at him with the pissiest look he has ever seen on anyone who is not Lydia Martin. “Derek. Derek, what if we get hungry?”

It turns out that Pizza Hut has no problem delivering to bedroom windows.

---

They have to leave the bedroom eventually, though. Derek has midterms to oversee early Monday morning, and Stiles has a five page paper due that same afternoon that he hasn’t even started. When it’s time to go, Derek presses him up against the bedroom door jam, cradles Stiles’ face in his hands, and kisses him long and slow, like they have all the time in the world. Stiles is just about to say that he’s sure he can get an extension on his paper and that Derek probably won’t get into too much trouble for postponing one little test when Derek pulls away and drops his hands. He steps back and looks around the room.

There’s a small pile of pizza boxes stacked in the corner by the window. The bed is a rumpled mess of stained sheets and pillows and wet towels from their shower that morning. On the floor next to the door is a flat of water bottles and a half-empty box of Pop-Tarts. Derek had texted his roommate for supplies sometime yesterday afternoon. He’d taken one look at the giant purple hickey just under Derek’s jaw, dropped the goods, and fled, possibly out of the house altogether. They hadn’t heard him since then, anyway.

Derek leans down and grabs a bottle of water and a package of Pop-Tarts and pushes them into Stiles’ hands. “Here, you need to eat.”

“Yeah, uh thanks. For the breakfast, not for the sex!” Stiles says, hoping he doesn’t sound as awkward as he feels. “But uh, thanks for that, too, I guess? I should go. I’m gonna do that now.”

Derek just stares after him and lets him find his own way to the front door. The back of his neck tingles when he reaches the sidewalk, but when he turns and looks at Derek’s window, it doesn’t look like the curtains have moved at all. Stiles munches on his Pop-Tarts while he walks back to his dorm and thinks about how everybody knows that it’s not just a one night stand if there’s breakfast in the morning. Everybody knows that.

---

That whole week is spent either avoiding Lydia, pseudo-casually loitering at The Daily Grind, the coffee shop just off campus, in hopes of running into Derek because he knows he likes to grade papers there, and trying not to think about the events of the weekend anywhere he can’t risk getting an involuntary erection. He fails on all counts because the universe hates him and wants him to suffer. Lydia ambushes him at the coffee shop on Thursday while he’s trying to figure out which table says, “hey, you come here, too? What a complete coincidence that we would be here at the same time,” while simultaneously giving him an unobstructed view of the door.

She pushes him into a chair that faces away from the door and opens with, “So I heard you spent all weekend chained to Hottie Hale’s bed.”

The pretty dark-haired barista drops a metal pitcher and it clangs loudly on the tile floor. She retrieves it with a smirk and he curses Lydia’s lack of discretion. There goes one more girl who won’t be giving him her number. Most of them wanted nothing to do with him once they heard that he was into guys, too.

“I don’t know why you care when the last time I saw you, you had an octopus by the name of Jackson attached to you. And how do you even know about that, anyway?” His hand goes to the scarf around his neck, checking that her manhandling didn’t move it enough to reveal the bite marks all over his neck. Her eyes follow the movement and he realizes too late that he should have left it alone.

“I know because you just told me,” she says with a smug grin, her eyes lingering on the scarf for a moment like she can see through it. “And who says I care? I was just making an observation. But if I did care, I might tell you that I don’t think you should rush into anything so soon after we broke up. Someone could get hurt.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, Lydia. I’ll be sure to take that sage advice into consideration.”

“I’m serious. You and I got together, what, two days after Jackson broke up with me? And see? Someone got hurt.”

“Yeah, and I’m that someone!” He sighs because yeah, he’s hurt, but mainly he’s just confused. “What are you doing with him, Lydia?”

She gives him a pitying look and shrugs lightly. “You wouldn’t understand.”

Stiles wonders if anyone could ever understand the complex equations that she uses to run her life. “No, I wouldn’t. You don’t need to worry about Derek’s poor little feelings, anyway. It was just a one night stand.”

“A one night stand that lasted all weekend with the guy you spent an entire semester mentally undressing,” she says, eyebrow raised.

“We never left the bedroom; it still counts.” He hears what might be a snort of derision from behind the coffee bar, but the barista appears to be innocently taking someone’s order.

Lydia looks impressed for half a second before she counters with, “Did this little weekend tryst of yours involve breakfast at any point? Because everyone knows it’s not just a one night stand if he makes you breakfast.”

“We ordered pizza a couple of times. And uh, he gave me some Pop-Tarts when I went home?” Stiles still isn’t sure what that means. Sure, Pop-Tarts are typically a breakfast food, but maybe the rule only applies if the guy goes to the trouble of cooking you breakfast, like eggs and bacon and shit.

Full on laughter erupts from behind the bar this time and when he looks over, the girl has her hands over her mouth, her shoulders shaking with mirth. Stiles narrows his eyes at her and she just laughs harder. He is so not tipping her the next time he comes in.

Lydia sighs and says something under her breath that sounds an awful lot like, boys. “Listen, you might think it was a one night stand, but I’m not so sure about him. He’s walked past the window three times since we’ve been sitting here.”

“What?” Stiles whirls around, nearly toppling out of his chair, but of course there’s no one there.

The sudden movement must have ruined the careful arrangement of his scarf because Lydia reaches across the table and tears it off of him. “On second thought, screw his feelings! What the hell did he do to your neck?”

“Nothing! Nothing I didn’t want him to.” He grabs the scarf back and wraps it around his neck before anyone else in the coffee shop can get an eyeful. He knows how bad it looks; that’s why he’s wearing a scarf.

“Stiles, it looks like someone tried to use you as a chew toy,” Lydia says.

“Yeah, well, you should see other guy.” He scratches the worst of the bites under the scarf and he’s helpless to stop the sense memory it triggers. Derek’s mouth latched onto the crook of his neck as he pounded into him over and over again, sucking hard at the skin and tracing the marks his teeth left behind with his tongue. He shifts in his seat, trying to create a little more room in his pants, but it doesn’t do much to help.

Lydia’s eyes widen, probably recognizing his awkward shifting for what it is, and says, “I wish I’d known you were this kinky when we were together.”

“Maybe if you’d given me a little more time.” It comes out more bitterly than he intended, but it’s not like he wants to take it back. They’re not friends and he doesn’t really feel up to reminiscing about the old days. Maybe someday they could be, but not yet.

He gets up, backpack shielding his crotch from view and tells her, “This has been awful. Let’s please never do this again.” He turns and goes before he has to see the pout on her face but he knows it’s there all the same.

---

It’s a universal truth that you always find what you’re looking for once you stop looking for it, so Stiles doesn’t know why he’s surprised to find Derek sitting on his bed three weeks later, just after he finally gave up loitering around Derek’s favorite haunts. He looks around the dorm room he shares with Scott and tries to figure out how the hell Derek got in. There’s only one door and it was locked, Stiles just used his key to open it, and they’re on the fifth floor, so the window probably wasn’t an option. Maybe he teleported.

“Your roommate let me in,” Derek says.

Oh. Or that. How nice of Scott to warn him. That’s not fair, Stiles thinks. He probably just got distracted by Allison. Or something shiny.

“Is there a specific reason why you’re here?” Stiles asks. He sits on Scott’s bed and immediately regrets it. There’s only four feet separating them now and the need to get closer, to make a physical connection with Derek’s body pulls at him until he has to grip the edge of the mattress to stay put. He should have stayed over by the door. The door was safer.

“Who were you rebounding from that night?”

“Lydia Martin.”

His brow furrows for a second as he tries to match a face to the name. “That redhead you used to spend half the class staring at?”

“She’s more of a strawberry blonde, actually,” he says automatically.

“Did it work? Did it help you get over her?” He gives Stiles that look again, the I’m-testing-you look.

Stiles shrugs. “I’m not really sure she’s someone you get over.” He’s been over it again and again in his head and while he knows he loves her, he might be willing to admit that he loved her more from afar. Still, there’s no way to delete her from his brain and that’s the only way he could ever truly be unaffected by her.

Derek’s face twists and he stands. “I guess you’ll just have to have a few more one night stands, then.”

He heads for the door but Stiles launches up from the bed and grabs his arm. “Come on Derek, you know that’s not what that was. One night stands don’t stake out your favorite coffee shop for three weeks and they sure as hell don’t show up at your dorm room unannounced. You’ve been avoiding me this whole time; why are you here now?”

Derek looks down at the floor and the silence stretches between them, long enough that Stiles drops his hand and is prepared to let Derek leave. He’s just so tired of chasing after people who don’t really want him. Finally Derek squares his shoulders and looks Stiles in the eye.

“I think I owe you breakfast. A real one, this time.”

His heart flutters a little in relief, but he hesitates before answering; he can’t resist making Derek sweat just a little. “I want pancakes.”

“Done,” Derek says and the corners of his mouth tip up in the beginning of a smile.

“And bacon and eggs. And orange juice, but not the kind with pulp. That stuff’s gross.” Stiles steps in close and counts off each item with a poke to Derek’s chest.

“Anything else?” Derek asks with a long suffering sigh, but he wraps one arm around Stiles’ waist and pulls him in even closer, slipping his hand under the hem of his shirt.

“This is probably still a bad idea,” Stiles tells him.

“Please stop saying that.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.” It sounds so stupid to his own ears because he still doesn’t believe that someone like him could even be capable of hurting someone like Derek, but Lydia is always right about everything and he can’t simply ignore her warning.

“You’re not the only one with an ex-girlfriend, you know,” Derek says. “We’ll work on it. The whole not hurting each other thing.”

“Yeah?” Stiles can’t help the hopeful look that hijacks his face.

“Yeah.” Derek rubs his thumb across the tender skin at the base of his neck, exactly where he’d put that gnarly bruise almost a month ago, and Stiles just knows he’s going to have another one there very soon.

“So what time should I show up for breakfast tomorrow?” he asks.

“How about we go to my place now and I start cooking whenever you get hungry?” Derek ducks his head and places a warm, wet kiss where his thumb was rubbing and Stiles’ knees go a little weak.

“Your house is far away,” he whines. It’s at least a ten minute walk and that is unacceptable.

“It is,” Derek agrees between kisses. “But I have a king sized bed and I don’t share a room with anyone.”

That is a very good point, one that Derek’s mouth and his wandering hands are making him want to ignore. The bed, though. There is no way he will be able to fully appreciate Derek’s body on his extra long twin. He pulls back and steps away from Derek’s grasp and it’s like surfacing after being held under water.

“Okay. We can go to your house, but you’re going to have to keep your hands to yourself on the way,” Stiles says sternly.

“I promise,” Derek says and hold his hands up in front of him.

He doesn’t trust the angelic look Derek’s face for a second, but they leave anyway and they manage to get all the way down to the crowded lobby before he feels the unmistakable touch of Derek’s palm sliding over his ass. Stiles turns bright red and thinks once again about what a terrible idea this is, but doesn’t do a damn thing to stop it.